Seagate ships world's first 8TB hard disk drive

Prices of SSDs may be falling, but for outright storage, it is still hard to beat the good old mechanical hard disk drive. Seagate has just announced that it has began shipping the world's first 8TB drives to select enterprise customers.

According to Seagate, having 8TB in an industry-standard 3.5-inch form factor lets businesses achieve maximum rack density, making efficient use of data center floor space. Seagate also claims that its new drive achieves the best watts/GB ratio for enterprise bulk storage in the industry.

Scott Horn, Seagate's Vice President of Marketing said, "As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers. Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.”

The drives are currently being shipped to select enterprise customers and wide scale availability is expected to come in the next quarter.